Show me again the time

        When in the Junetide's prime

    We flew by meads and mountains northerly!--

Yes, to such freshness, fairness, fulness, fineness, 

    freeness,

        Love lures life on.

But recently I have come to the conclusion that unless I just begin reading books I want to read, even if I think I have no time to do so, I will never find the time.  This, I know, is not profound, but nevertheless it feels like a small piece of wisdom to hang onto these days.  And so, even though I have no real business doing so, even though my garden is screaming for attention, even though I have music to learn and papers to write, even though my house needs serious cleaning, I am reading.

In celebration of this little act, here are a few books and authors that I have recently found.  That these writers would now make my top 10 list and I hadn’t read ANY of them a year ago, reminds me that there’s a lifetime of good reading still to be discovered. 

A Place of My Own by Michael Pollan.  I know I am slow to jump on the Michael Pollan bandwagon.  In fact, I still haven’t read that Omnivores’s Dilemma.  But I will, one of these days, because I am so taken with Pollan’s style.  I think he could write about anything and make it interesting.  This book is about him building, with his own two hands and some helpful friends, a writing studio.  It’s a wonderful, inspiring read and makes me want to do the same, almost.  

The Fiddler in the Subway by Gene Weingarten.  I once used this Pultizer Prize winning essay as the inspiration for an American Music Teacher column.  This is a collection of essays written by Weingarten for the Washington Post.  They are, every last one of them, brilliantly written.

Let’s Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell.  OK.  I lied just a bit.  I had read Gail Caldwell before this year, as she was the book critic for the Boston Globe while we lived there.   I used to read every review she wrote even if I could care less about the book, because her writing was so stunning.  I had been hearing about this book, subtitled A Memoir of Friendship, since it was published last year, and in mid-November reserved it from the library.  Only last week--last week!--did I get an email telling me that this book was waiting for me.  This long waiting list should have been my first clue that this book was something special.  

I read it in 24 hours and immediately went out and bought a copy for myself and my two best friends.  This is not just a book about friendship, although it is that, it is also an ode to building a life for yourself that you can be proud of.  The sub-themes are too numerous to list here, but as I emailed several friends in the days after finishing this beautiful book, “Run, don’t walk to your nearest bookstore/library and get this book.”  

You will thank me.

strikes me from sleep, and I rise

from the comfortable bed and go 

to another room, where my books are lined up

in their neat and colorful rows.  How

magical they are!  I choose one

and open it.  Soon

I have wandered in over the waves of the words

to the temple of thought.

                                            And then I hear

outside, over the actual waves, the small, 

perfect voice of the loon.  He is also awake,

and with his heavy head uplifted he calls out

to the fading moon, to the pink flush

swelling in the east that, soon, 

will become the long, reasonable  day.

                                                                    Inside the house

it is still dark, except for the pool of lamplight 

in which I am sitting.

                    I do not close the book.

Neither, for a long while, do I read on.

        -Mary Oliver

            What Do We Know 

It is time to return to that damn list.

That doesn’t mean, however, that I have not been thinking about practicing, because I am always thinking about practicing.  It is not hard to present a list of practicing techniques, what’s difficult is to figure out where to begin.  Thinking this over, I decided to begin where our students begin if we do not intervene:  they simply repeat mindlessly.

I know this, because when I ask, they tell me.  Sometimes they tell me this sheepishly, knowing that they should have done better.  Sometimes they reveal this practice strategy quite proudly.  

Take this encounter, for example:

Yesterday, Jake played his little intermediate Mozart minuet, which had more mistakes in it than not.  My first question is a predictable one.  

“So, how did you practice this?” 

“Well, now I am thinking that this wasn’t such a good idea, but I just played it a lot of times.”  

Jake at least has enough wherewithal to know that I’m not going to like this answer.  I’m somewhat gratified to hear this recognition, but still, given the poor performance I have just heard, it would have been nice if this self-reflection could have come earlier in the week.  

This practice approach is hardly unusual, and if you think your students aren’t just “playing it a lot of times” then you are probably deceiving yourself.  In fact, I wrote a paper last semester dealing with self-regulation and student practice and found several studies where researchers examining student practice strategies discovered that overwhelmingly the most popular strategy was repetition.  

It’s time to change that. 

But change is hard, because if I am honest with myself, I resort to the good old “play it a lot of times” strategy myself from time to time.  Repetition has its place, certainly.  The key is noticing when repetition isn’t markedly improving the situation.  

So.  We begin our list with a nod to the power and temptation that repetition has in our practice routines and the challenge to notice whether or not it is working.  

Sometimes it will.  But often, as Jake would say, “it wasn’t such a good idea.”